1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for financial transaction data (authentication, authorization and payment data) exchange between a point of sale device, e.g. vending machine etc. and an authorization center (an entity responsible for authentication, authorization and corresponding payment and settlement procedures of the transaction), and to a payment terminal device to be used in this system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Mobile telephony is booming throughout the world and provides many recently developed applications in data communication. One of the hottest new services is payment through mobile phone which is generally called “m-commerce”. There are available m-commerce solutions, most of them are based on WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) technology which promises to bring all the benefits of Internet to a mobile phone. Other solutions use calls to a special payment terminal, those calls being activated either from an authorization center or a subscriber or user. But there are severe obstacles preventing faster acceptance of m-commerce, especially in a non-internet domain, which are the costs of the known payment terminals with regard to their acquisition as well as operating costs. Among other things, this is due to the fact that each payment terminal has to include a fairly sophisticated communication interface which has to cover all the different, possible new and currently established standards of data communication in mobile telephone networks and phones.